flickr goes gamma and adds new features!

This whole time, flickr has been technically beta software. Well, as they went gamma, they have decided to add a great new feature based on mashups that people were already doing using Google Maps API – they are providing a map of the world where users can drag their pictures to the spot it was taken. It then gets geotagged with that spot. So for those of us who don’t have some GPS method of figuring things out, flickr has made it easy for us. And, any photos you have previously geotagged with long/lat will automatically be mapped. So far people are complaining that there’s only good coverage in the USA map whereas Google has good coverage world-wide. I expect this to be fixed soon, though, as more and more people complain. I know that a good portion of the pictures I like to visit are created by non-US nationals.

As an example of how this new technology works, click on the picture above. Scroll down and right under my copyright notice, but above the type of camera it was created with, you will see “Taken in New York, New York (map)”. If you click on “map” it will be mapped and if you zoom in enough, you will see where it was taken. Brilliant!